Bathypelagia

Read Kate Middleton's introduction to Bathypelagia.

ISBN: 9780645761665

This product ships on 17 March

Roughly 1000 to 4000 metres below sea level lies the bathypelagic (also known as the ‘midnight’) zone. No sunlight penetrates these depths. It’s a constant 4° Celsius and water pressure reaches 680 kilograms per square centimetre. The creatures who inhabit this zone are often transparent, moving minimally to conserve energy, as they carry out their bioluminescent lives under the ocean’s crushing weight. Bathypelagia is an imaginary space, a miniature sea. It’s a viscous metaphor and an internal state. Lying awake at 3 a.m., it’s the menagerie of quietly fraught voices you might hear in those small hours. Here, the lines are blurred between lover and predator, nurture and survival, between the intimate and the strange (and estranged). Distances aren’t always easy to judge, and migration is more likely to be vertical. But under the cover of darkness, tender moments also find refuge.

These poems were written over a long and discontinuous period, starting about 15 years ago. Back then, I snorkelled and scuba-dived regularly. Some of my most alive experiences have been drifting underwater, without words. Equally, many of them have been when I’m suspended inside a poem.

This is a book of encounters. Some of them have human hands, some fins, yet others, tentacles. Some even beat with three hearts. If you draw a long breath, kick down into the gloom and hold very still, these poems, I hope, will swim a little closer.

–Debbie Lim

Praise from Sarah Holland-Batt

Bathypelagia is a powerful, memorable collection whose poems fluoresce with an otherworldly light, drawing us in. Debbie Lim’s vivid, richly imagistic poems find illumination in the ocean’s claustrophobic midnight zone, paying close and artful attention to the creatures inhabiting a region largely untouched by humans. Yet through these miraculous visitations—of vampire squid, falling whale carcasses, corals, knife-fish, glass sponges—Lim finds kinship with the deep sea’s denizens, inviting us to imagine and even love what we can never fully know or see. I loved these poems for their wildness, their clarity of vision, and their expert command of form and line. Bathypelagia’s strangeness and unlikely intimacy is exhilarating.